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Officer ‘Separations’ Break More Than Years of Service

How does it feel when the country for which you’ve lost youth, relationships and health wants to get rid of you? It feels like betrayal. If the Army is our family, then this is divorce.

The week of June 22 was a hard one for Army captains. After announcing in early December that about 20 percent of captains commissioned in 2006, 2007 and 2008 would receive pink slips this spring, the cuts were finally handed down starting June 23. Those who were chosen for the ax (or, as Army officials more tactfully call it, separation) were given the bad news in a meeting with a senior officer. Everyone else waited nervously to see whether they would be next.

The Army isn’t the only service enduring reductions. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have announced “force shaping,” too. While officers face separation boards or are denied promotions — and, therefore, required to exit — even more enlisted service members are being downsized. Instead of being asked to leave after being reviewed, however, they are simply not permitted to re-enlist, an action that had been all but guaranteed when the wars were raging. While the Army stands at about 520,000 soldiers today, the Pentagon’s 2015 budget proposal calls for it to shrink by almost 60,000 by 2017.

About 1,100 Army captains in June heard “Thank you for your service. You have until April 1 to exit the Army.” About 500 Army majors were to get the same news this week. My husband escaped the reduction — this time. Many of my friends’ husbands and, by extension, my friends themselves, were not so lucky. After giving between seven and as many as 17 years of service, these officers and their families are being ordered to leave. Many of them don’t have a backup career plan. When they joined the Army they, like my husband and me, planned to stay 20 years or more.

They have watched buddies die, missed anniversaries, first steps and birthdays. And now, just like that, it is all over.

For the entirety of our Army service the enemy has been “over there,” far away in Afghanistan or Iraq. We grew comfortable with the danger of deployments, reassuring ourselves that in a down economy where factory-working or cubicle-dwelling civilian friends faced layoffs, we had job security. With a steady paycheck on the 1st and 15th of the month, military service felt safe compared to the nightmare of unemployment. But it doesn’t anymore.

Officer separations have been used throughout American history as a means of controlling the size of the force. Targeting cuts at certain commission-year groups is not new. When the military didn’t need you anymore, it let you go. It happened after World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Downsizing is a normal way for the military to recover from war.

But none of us were around then. We don’t care that it’s all been done before. For us it feels fresh, terrifying and even insulting. Force reductions feel very personal and, after all is said and done, rather arbitrary. When the cuts were announced, Army officials said that primarily those with poor evaluations or reprimands on their record would be targeted. But nothing ever works as seamlessly in real life as on paper. Those who “deserve it” are not the only ones who get fired.

“I just don’t understand why us,” my friend whose spouse was selected for the cuts told me. “There are so many others who are worse.”

After giving up her blooming career as a counselor to follow her husband to a new duty station, and spending at least 39 months without him during their relationship thanks to training and deployments, she doesn’t understand what more they could have done to deserve to stay.

There is one kind of survivor’s guilt when friends and neighbors are arbitrarily cut down by war. There is another kind when friends and neighbors are arbitrarily cut down by peace. When my friends’ husbands were killed or seriously injured downrange, I didn’t understand why we made it out unscathed. But now I feel a sense of survivor’s guilt that my spouse has a job while so many others soon won’t. Did they really escape death on the battlefield only to be a casualty of force reductions? And while my family is safe for now, this won’t be the only time the Army makes cuts. Over our heads hangs the cloud of “maybe we’re next.”

When a job is a way of life and your coworkers are your family, pink slips feel like betrayal. After years of combat deployments, training separations, child births while alone and cross-country moves, we have given so much in the service of our country. The military has become the closest family many of us have ever had. And now, just like that, some of us are orphans.
Amy Bushatz is an Army wife, mother and the managing editor of Military.com’s SpouseBuzz blog. You can follow her on Twitter at @amybushatz.

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